The Quick and the Dead (1995)

DIRECTOR: Sam Raimi

CAST: Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lance Henriksen, Keith David

REVIEW:

The Quick and the Dead is Sam Raimi switching gears from campy horror movie (his Evil Dead movies) to campy Western. To this end, Raimi proves he’s intimately familiar with Western tropes and cliches which he both gleefully satirizes and pays affectionate homage to. The result is a movie that’s style over substance, often feeling like little more than a vehicle using a flimsy narrative skeleton to move from one gunfight to the next, but it’s still often a lot of campy fun until never really seeming to amount to very much and eventually running out of gas with an underwhelming conclusion.

The set-up is simple and straightforward. A taciturn gunslinger—a gender-bent archetype of “The Man With No Name”, except she has one, Ellen (Sharon Stone)—rides into town to settle a score. But she’ll have to get in line, because this town is presided over by the unsubtly-named John Herod (Gene Hackman), who lives in a big Dickensian house looming ominously at the end of Main Street, rules with an iron fist, taxes the townspeople to the bone, and holds an annual gunfighting contest where anyone can enter, opponents are paired off, and then, well, we find out who’s quick and who’s dead. Why does Herod do this? Well, the reasons are a little murky, but nevermind; it’s High Noon every day around here, and Ellen joins a motley crew including the self-aggrandizing Ace Hanlon (Lance Henriksen) and the mysterious Sergeant Cantrell (Keith David), among various others. Whoever wins each contest advances to the next level until last man—or woman—standing collects the prize money, meaning Ellen will have a few opponents to face if she wants to avoid going home empty-handed (or dead), along with possible more personal motives involving Herod himself. But along the way, she also makes a couple allies, including Cort (Russell Crowe), a former outlaw-turned-priest who has a history with Herod, and “The Kid” (Leonardo DiCaprio), a cocky up-and-coming gunslinger and Herod’s unacknowledged son.

You’ve probably figured out by now that the skeletal framework is just a vehicle to serve up a string of shootouts on a regular basis en route to the inevitable climactic confrontation, but Raimi gleefully leaves no Western trope unturned even while poking tongue-in-cheek fun. There’s the (Wo)Man With No Name riding into town to settle a score for a terrible wrong in the past, and characters have names like The Kid, Ace Hanlon, Dog Kelly (Tobin Bell), Doc Wallace (Roberts Blossom), Scars (Mark Boone Junior), Eugene Dred (Kevin Conway), and a Native American warrior named Spotted Horse (Jonothon Gill), who declares he cannot be killed by a bullet and says things like “many white men will go home in wooden box!” (if that sounds offensively caricaturish, keep in mind the movie is actively and gleefully satirizing Western tropes even as it also pays affectionate homage). The rogues gallery are given colorful hard-boiled touches to match their colorful names; one man adds an ace to his deck of cards every time he kills a man, while another keeps a tally by carving scratches into his arm. There’s also the requisite surly bartender (Pat Hingle) and a coffin-maker named Charlie Moonlight (Woody Strode), who prides himself on guessing everyone’s height with unerring precision. It’s the kind of movie where, as if the villain’s villainy is not made clear enough by the fact that he’s named “Herod”, a cold wind blows in the door upon his arrival, he has henchmen/bodyguards in long black leather coats who follow him around everywhere, and he casts a ridiculously long shadow across saloon floor. How much of a cool customer is Herod? Consider the scene where he lights a match with one hand and executes a quick draw with the other, blowing a hole through his opponent’s head big enough to give us a wide shot of Main Street, all without interrupting the match’s journey to the cigar in his lips. Raimi directs with occasional flourishes of visual flair, such as when early in the movie a character gets shot through their hat brim and the sun shines through the hole into the camera lens; a nice touch, but Raimi outdoes himself later by showing the sun shining through a bullet hole in an unlucky gunslinger’s shadow. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti, who also did gorgeous work on 1992’s superior The Last of the Mohicans, makes the movie look good, with low-hanging ominous skies over the isolated town, making it look ripe for vengeance of Biblical proportions (the weather also obliges by raining all the time for atmospheric effect, although nothing is ever green).

Alas, one of the things holding the movie back is Sharon Stone herself (who also produced), whose stone-faced, personality-deficient Ellen is easily the least interesting character in the movie. Stone is blandly adequate as long as she’s playing tight-lipped and stoic, but when she’s finally required to display emotion late in the movie, her acting limitations are obvious to a cringeworthy extent. As our heroine, she leaves a central void. On the other hand, Gene Hackman seems to be greatly enjoying himself as the deliciously villainous Herod, even if he’s basically playing a slightly more over-the-top version of his sheriff from Unforgiven, though this has the somewhat backhanded effect of leaving our villain a lot more fun to watch than our ostensible “star”. Aussie Russell Crowe in one of his first US roles is appealing as Ellen’s ally and quasi-love interest Cort, and Leonardo DiCaprio exudes cocky panache as The Kid. In smaller supporting roles, the likes of Lance Henriksen, Keith David, Kevin Conway, Mark Boone Junior, Jonothon Gill, Tobin Bell, Pat Hingle, Roberts Blossom, and Sven-Ole Thorsen serve up a colorful rogues gallery of Western n’er-do-wells, and there’s cameos by Gary Sinise, Woody Strode, and Raimi regular Bruce Campbell.

The Quick and the Dead is entertaining fun for a while, but when all is said and done, there’s a sense that none of it adds up to very much. The movie also doesn’t play fair in the climactic confrontation, giving its heroine some assistance with a “cheat” or two, meaning our inevitable final showdown that everyone can see coming a hundred miles away doesn’t end up giving us the desired satisfaction when we finally get to it (not, it’s worth pointing out, that we ever become very emotionally invested in Stone’s Ellen or by extension her quest for righteous vengeance in the first place). The result is a movie that can be a lot of fun in the moment but ends up all style over substance.

* * 1/2